I see you've found some connections, I would guess you're doing things correctly. You can also look at all people with a certain surname, and then sort them by birth, or alphabetically on first name, etc. This could be made more robust (search only within certain years, etc), but that's what it is.
Not all branches will connect directly to the global family tree, there's definitely a lot of lineages that haven't been entered yet. Especially outside the English-speaking countries.